1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of data processing systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for dilation for rendering of glyphs.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many different electronic displays exist today for a plurality of devices, including a variety of desktop and laptop computer displays, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular telephones, MP3 players, and portable gaming systems. Various applications existed using the different displays wherein the displays may be used, for example, in different types of lighting (e.g., low to high light levels) at different angles of viewing (e.g., straight ahead, from above, or to the side), or different orientations of the display (e.g., vertical or horizontal). In addition, the technical features of the various displays widely vary (e.g., dots or pixels per inch {DPI}, number of horizontal, and/or number of vertical lines may be greater for a laptop display then for a cellular telephone display).
For glyphs on various displays, dilation may be performed to thicken an outline in the glyph's creation. The outline as initially created may be difficult to map pixels to so as to make a glyph legible. For example, the outline may be thin as to map to only one or a few pixel width when displaying. On high resolution displays, the few pixels may be unrecognizable and therefore the glyph be illegible, difficult to decipher, or unpleasant to a viewer. Dilation is constant, though, without regards to display and/or application type. Independent of the amount of skew, scaling, rotation, type of character, font, resolution, etc. that a glyph endures, dilation is always performed using a constant factor. Therefore, what might be clearly discernible on one display for a specific application may be difficult to read or recognize on a different display and/or application. For example, a display with less DPI may make the same glyph more difficult to read than on a display with more DPI.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for improving dilation and rendering of glyphs for various displays and/or applications.